In recent years, the Internet has become more popular, allowing users to access information in ways never before possible. Information on the Internet is useful to a broad spectrum of individuals, including investors, financial analysts, entrepreneurs, and academics. Changes reflected in a Web page, a large dip in a stock's value, or a new merger amongst competing companies, for instance, may be of critical importance to the users of the network.
However, keeping track of this constantly changing information is not easy. Logging on to the Internet every day to monitor changes can be time consuming. Thus, Web utilities have been developed, for instance, FirstFloor's “Smart Bookmarks”™, which periodically monitor user defined Web sites and automatically notify the user when changes occur at a Web site (e.g., a change in the text), without the user having to log on.
Unfortunately, such monitoring utilities generally do not allow the user to customize the type of change or information being monitored to the particular interests of the user. In addition, while such utilities can monitor changes within a particular Web site, they cannot monitor relationships amongst changes in several Web sites. Such changes, for example, the addition of a keyword reflecting a new product at several Web sites, may indicate the move to a new technology. Similarly, newly created links amongst a group of Web sites may indicate an industry alliance is forming. Such industry wide (not company specific) information may be of greater importance to the user than changes reflected at a single Web site. Thus, a user may be forced to constantly monitor several Web sites in search of such new relationships, an even more time consuming and difficult task than monitoring a single Web site.
Another limitation of such utilities is that once a change is detected at a given Web site, the change is automatically communicated to the user, regardless of its importance. Thus, a great deal of information irrelevant to the user may nevertheless be communicated, again wasting the user's time.
What is needed is a utility which (1) monitors the Internet for the occurrence of user-defined conditions, including relationships amongst one or more Web sites, (2) performs a search for information of importance to the user upon detection of such conditions, and (3) provides the user with the results of the search.